AAR: A Weedy Siege

"Several weeks back we ran into this POS.

12 CHAs
5 Equipment Assembly
Capital Assembly
Large Assembly
Research Arrays
2 SMAs

Oh, and two floating Nidhoggurs.

J141322 is the system and it is a C4 Pulsar with C3 and C4 static. The goal of this op is to go in, burn that tower to the ground, and collect lewt. Most (if not all) will be given towards our SRP wallet which has been sevearly hurting lately. Given this is a Pulsar, people need to bring and/or buy shield ships to participate. Heres the rundown.

- Go in on Friday and Reinforce the Tower (setting up our own staging POS in the process)
- Spend the weekend waiting for the timer to run down and staging out of their hole to look for pew (using shield PvP ships)
- Sunday when it (most likely) comes out of RF, burn it down and collect paychecks

Op success!" - Excerpt from a Deployment Message.

Now, upon seeing this, two things ran through my mind: Possibility of good loot, and good opportunity to force people to buy shield ships. After several recent welpings of shield ships were severely lacking any in the home system. Now, knowing that we fly primarily armor ships, most people did not see the motivation to buy another shield ship, which is unfortunate because you should have enough ships to fit into any fleet that we may fly, not just the ones that we mostly fly. Now since this target system was a Pulsar effect which buffed shields, it was an excellent opportunity to force people to buy their shield ships again and get a proper group of them back in the home system. Not to mention, 12 Corp Hangers? who needs that much space? Not even ore should take that much space because you can compress in a POS now with a new module.

So we put it all together, and move out on Friday, certainty an interesting weekend ahead of us.

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Day 1 - Friday

We get mildly lucky as the entrance was one jump from Hek, a Minmatar trade hub. Unfortunately though, we decided to stage most of our supplies in Amarr the day before, which made travel and logistics mildly annoying. Regardless, we managed to move in and setup shop with a Large Amarr Control Tower and anchor it. We spend the next hour anchoring and onlining POS modules and getting more people in with bashing ships. In the meantime we use our Logistics to get our POS's shields up to a satisfied level.

That is a fair bit of Logistics

Since we anchored our POS out of DScan range of the target POS, their online pilots never caught a whiff of what was happening, as they did not venture beyond their POS's Force Field. We wait until they log off, and bash it into reinforced mode. It comes out 1920 Eve time on Sunday. Now its a waiting game and hole control.

Although it should be noted that I was already calling this an op success, due to the number of shield ships that we were able to get people to buy.

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Day 2 - Saturday

Today is the boring day, all we are going to be doing is hole control and monitoring the local's activities. Oh, and guessing POS passwords of course. Since there are two floating Nidhoggurs in the Forcefield of the tower, if we guessed the POS password we could get a Nidhoggur pilot in there and fly them out and steal them. After maybe an hour of guessing since we had nothing better to do we give up. Then Zeras comes on, which after 20 or so guesses he gets it right: maconha, which is Portuguese for marijuana, Apparently he realized that most of the titles were in Protuguese, and just went from there down the same lists we did, just in a different language. And so that is the story of how we got two free Nidhoggurs.

 

It wasn't too long after this that the CEO of the target corporation logged in. He wasted no time in trying to say we had broken the EULA by bumping his carriers out of the Force Field, even though it was completely legal to guess the password. Then he threatened to trash all of the items in the Corp Hangers and Assembly Arrays and Laboratories. At first we laughed it off, thinking that since the Hangers were offline since the POS was in Reinforced that he had no access to move / repackage / trash. After offlining a hanger at our staging POS though and testing it, we discovered he could indeed trash every single item in the Hangers. Needless to say, we were pissed, because one of the main reasons we chose this system over others was potential loot. The fact that someone could just CTRL-A and right click and trash all of their items even when the module was offline PLUS the tower being in reinforced mode was, and still is, a broken concept. With this mechanic why would people evict someone for loot, which is a primary motivation for many people. People can just self-destruct all their ships and trash all of their equipment, leaving nothing for the bashers but 3 days of wasted time. It is something that desires looking at by CCP to prevent people from trashing items in hangers that are offline.

Tomorrow though we get to see how much exactly he was able to trash before we burned it all to the ground.

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Day 3 - Sunday

Different day, same activities. Just wait around and maintain control until the RF timer runs down. He is still scratching his head at the thought of how we 'bumped' his carriers out of the POS
So, he starts trying to self destruct ships, so we get bumping battleships to bump him out of the forcefield and pod him. After several failed attempts we were able to kill two Mackinaws that we had bumped out while he was self destructing. He had ejected before the ship had reached the edge though, and thus no pod kill like we wanted. So we switched tactics from trying to kill him to bumping him to force him to eject and then steal the empty ship. It only took a few ships to convince him not to self destruct anymore, and just sit there in a pod.

As the timer runs down to the very end, they start self destructing the shinny ships, a Vargur, several Tengus and various other things. The CEO loads up in a Mastodon and tris to collect all the shinny stuff together in it. He is looting the wrecks of the self destructed ships as well and cargo cans his corp mates are jetting as well. By some miracle of fate, Kildres in an Onyx jet canned something and the Mastodon warped to it, needless to say, he died and was podded. It was only afterwords that we realized that the Mastodon had tried to loot the can that Kildres had dropped, and that caused him to warp to it, nearly 300km off the POS. He was just blind looting everything on his overview without paying attention to distance. Bob was truly with us.

It wasn't too long after that we burned everything. The total estimated tally was 5 billion in loot, plus 1 billion from insurance from self-destructing the Nidhoggurs, and many unknown value Blueprint Copies. Not bad for thinking he would trash everything ahead of time.

And now the extraction happens. Six hours later we were completely extracted with our loot as well. Was an, interesting weekend. Maybe not the most exciting since it was POS bashing, but it had its moments.

It was a good showing.

Good weekend.



Blöd